ATM inventor tells how he did it (and why he's not rich)

Don Wetzel returns to New York to mark creation's 50th anniversary

Fifty years ago this week, the very first automated teller machine was installed outside a Chemical Bank branch in Rockville Centre, L.I. There are now more than 3 million ATMs around the world and a lot of people have never withdrawn money any other way.

Today, JPMorgan Chase celebrated the invention's half-century anniversary with a ceremony outside the former Chemical branch and invited the ATM's 93-year-old inventor, Don Wetzel. He spoke with Crain’s after the event.

I was a professional baseball player first. I played in the New York Giants’ farm system until a fellow named Connie Ryan, who played for the Boston Braves and was from my hometown of New Orleans, said if you haven’t made it into the majors in five years, quit. So after three years in the minors I quit. In the baseball off-season I went to Loyola University in New Orleans, got a degree in 1951 and went to IBM. That’s when I got introduced to computers. I wasn’t an engineer, I was mostly in sales.

How did you get involved in creating the ATM?

By the late 1960s I was at Docutel as vice president of product planning, which meant I had to come up products the company could sell. I was visiting executives in different industries and would ask them, "What would you like to have that you don’t have?" I was coming up with nothing. On a Friday before a business trip I needed cash so I went to the bank and there was a long line, not moving, and we were all wasting time. I realized that all tellers were doing was taking in checks and handing out cash and thought maybe we could make a machine to replace them. I spoke to our engineers and they got on it.

How long did it take?

About 11 months. We started looking into it in 1968 and installed the first ATM at Chemical Bank in September 1969. I asked our board for $4 million for the project, which was a significant amount of money. A member of the board of our parent company was a banker and told me it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard.

Why Chemical?

Another board member at our parent company was a Chemical executive, so we had a relationship with that bank. We asked them to give the ATM a try. They said maybe it has potential, maybe it doesn’t, but okay, we’ll do it.

Were they any technical glitches at first?

To the best of my knowledge, only once did rain get into the machine. We fixed that and it never happened again. There were a few problems—a printer went bad—but nothing you couldn’t fix quickly.

A number of people take credit for inventing the ATM. What's your claim?

I know that but no one else did it like we did. I saw an early device in London and it was a totally different concept. You had to go to bank and buy a cardboard card for 10 pounds and the machine kept your card, so you had to buy another card to use it again.

Did you make a lot of money from inventing something so impactful?

No, but I did get to keep my job. The patent was owned by the company, you signed away all rights. No dollars, not even cents did I get. But I was treated very well by the company.

Paul Volcker once said that the ATM was the most important financial innovation he’d seen in the last 20 years.

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